Summarize with :

How Agencies Can Use Interactive Content to Generate Leads and New Revenue

What’s the first thing you do as soon as you wake up in the morning? I check my Twitter feed, scroll through Facebook updates, save a couple of reads and then forget all about it. I am a millennial – I binge on content even before I bite into my breakfast. And if this content doesn’t hook me for more than 5 seconds, I do just that – forget it. With such short attention spans, and a constant craving for good content, engaging Millennials is a challenge. And more so when majority of us have tuned out ads.

Today, interactive content for agencies is becoming a valuable way to help clients improve engagement, generate leads, and create better digital experiences. An interactive content agency can offer quizzes, calculators, assessments, and recommendation tools as part of its digital marketing services.

As a digital agency, your main target audience, and that of your major clientele, are the millennials. In times such as these – where time is limited but consumable content is unlimited – how do you engage them?

This innovative marketing technique thrives on the principle of engaging prospects by adding real value and providing instant gratification.

Interactive experiences like calculators, quizzes, and assessments facilitate a two-way communication, something old school content like blogs, whitepapers, and ebooks can’t. This results in high engagement levels. End users don’t have to commit to find value, and thus interactive experiences resonate with them. This is probably why, back in 2013, New York Times’ top story was a quiz!

And that’s not it. Millennials’ favorite digital content platform, Buzzfeed, publishes an average of 8 quizzes every day. And ever since they have optimized the quiz formula, their engagement graph has shot up (check it out below).

Given the awesome response that interactive content receives, some marketers are already embracing it. According to a report issued by the Content Marketing Institute earlier this year, 46% of marketers surveyed were using interactive content as a part of their marketing initiatives.

As a digital agency, it’s time to truly go digital and step up to this opportunity. Interactive content marketing can help your clients reach a wider audience base, capture more leads, and get better conversions. At the same time, this approach can add a new revenue stream for your business and strengthen your portfolio of digital agency services.

Understanding Interactive Content – An Overview

Interactive content adds value, answers questions, and renders a personalized experience for your audience. It cannot be consumed without interaction and thus, facilitates two-way communication and starts a dialogue. These formats make interactive content for lead generation useful across different stages of the customer journey. Experiences like calculators, quizzes and online surveys make your customers feel important by giving them an output that is only for them. They talk to the end user. As a result you get rich user data which opens up awesome possibilities.

The three most widely used forms of interactive content are calculators, quizzes, and assessments.

Quizzes

Did you know – Buzzfeed’s quiz – “What City Should You Actually Live In” – has been taken 22 Million times and liked 2.5 Million times on Facebook!

This amazing engagement rate is what inspires marketers to use quizzes to generate new business.

For instance, a quiz along the lines of “Which car is the right fit for my needs?” would be ideal for someone doing lead generation for an auto dealer or an auto insurance provider.

Quizzes can also provide a quantifiable value on a personality characteristic or set of traits you may feel you have. And as a marketer you’d want your campaigns to do just that. Thus, quizzes come handy as an effective tool to appeal to the core psychology of your target audience.

Here’s an example of an interactive quiz built with Outgrow –

Calculators

When you want to buy insurance or enroll in an online school, the first thing you want to know is “what is the cost?” Calculators can help you answer such pressing questions from your customers. How much will it cost? What is the ROI? How much will it save?

In fact, millions of searches are made every month along these lines where the primary intent is to understand the cost or ROI of making a purchase.

Calculators, just like quizzes, are attuned to human psychology as users are inclined to research on their own before any sales pitch. Thus, engagement rates are high. In fact, according to our data, more than half of the people who start a calculator, complete it.

Here’s an interactive calculator built with Outgrow –

Assessments

Your customers always want to know more about themselves, especially where they can improve. And if you can give them a “grade,” they will go to great lengths to get an A! In their pursuit of a perfect score, you get deep engagement and data. Lots of data!

According to a recent research report by the Content Marketing Institute, more than 50% of marketers trust assessments when it comes to engaging prospects in the early stage.

Below is an assessment built with Outgrow-

How Agencies Can Create New Revenue Streams With Interactive Content

For agencies, interactive experiences are more than another marketing tactic. They can become a scalable addition to your service offering. Instead of limiting your work to strategy, design, paid campaigns, or content creation, you can package calculators, quizzes, assessments, and recommendation tools into client campaigns. By offering interactive content for agencies as a service, agencies can create additional revenue through strategy, development, customization, and ongoing optimization. Adding quizzes, calculators, and assessments to your service offering can support lead generation for digital agencies while creating new opportunities to sell strategy and campaign services.

This creates opportunities to charge for strategy, development, customization, optimization, and ongoing performance management. Agencies can also build interactive experiences as part of larger campaigns and use the resulting data to identify additional opportunities for clients. By positioning these experiences as measurable marketing assets, digital agency services become more valuable and easier to differentiate from competitors.

How Agencies Can Use Interactive Content for Lead Generation

Interactive experiences can also strengthen agency lead generation by giving prospects a reason to engage instead of simply asking them to fill out a generic contact form. Agencies can create assessments that evaluate a prospect’s marketing maturity, calculators that estimate potential savings, or quizzes that help businesses identify the right strategy. When designed around a specific customer need, interactive content for lead generation can capture valuable information while providing users with immediate value. Interactive quizzes, calculators, and assessments can support agency lead generation by giving potential customers a reason to engage and share their information. Interactive experiences can create new opportunities for lead generation for digital agencies by combining audience engagement with lead capture.

The information collected through these experiences can help agencies understand a prospect’s needs before the first sales conversation. This makes follow-up more relevant and creates a more personalized path from initial interaction to consultation. For agencies looking to grow their own pipeline, interactive experiences can therefore become a valuable part of their interactive content marketing strategy.

Interactive experiences can also strengthen agency lead generation by giving prospects a reason to engage instead of simply asking them to fill out a generic contact form. Agencies can create assessments that evaluate a prospect’s marketing maturity, calculators that estimate potential savings, or quizzes that help businesses identify the right strategy.

Best Tools and Platforms to Build Interactive Content

Once you’ve decided to add interactive content to your agency’s services, the next question is which platform to build it on. Most no-code interactive content tools let you create quizzes, calculators, and assessments without writing a single line of code, which matters when you need to turn around client campaigns quickly.

When evaluating an interactive content tool, look for a few things: drag-and-drop editing so your team can build and iterate fast, integrations with the CRM and email tools your clients already use, analytics that show completion rates and drop-off points, and white-labeling options so the experience matches each client’s brand. Outgrow, as shown in the examples above, is built specifically around these needs, letting agencies design, brand, and launch calculators, quizzes, and assessments for multiple clients from a single dashboard.

The right content creation platform doesn’t just save build time, it becomes part of your agency’s toolkit for delivering interactive experiences at scale, across clients and industries.

How Can You Sell Interactive Content to Your Clients

Once you’ve understood how interactive content can turnaround your marketing game, and that of your clients, it’s time to pitch it to them. Agencies can demonstrate the value of interactive content for lead generation by connecting engagement metrics with leads, conversions, and other campaign results. Positioning your business as an interactive content agency can help you offer a specialized service instead of treating interactive experiences as a one-time campaign. Agencies can also use these experiences for their own agency lead generation by demonstrating their capabilities through interactive campaigns. Showing clients how interactive experiences contribute to lead generation for digital agencies can make the value of the service easier to demonstrate.

Show Them Success Stories

Success stories can be a real driving force in the adoption of interactive content. According to Content Marketing Institute, around 63% of the marketers believe that case studies are one of the most effective marketing tactics. So, showing your clients how interactive marketing helped other brands grow and sell better, you can encourage them to give it a try. Try creating case studies, blog posts, and presentations to make the case.

Prove with Research and Metrics

Hard numbers sell better than any sales pitch or marketing banter. While each of the statistics reveal the importance of content marketing to your clients, here are some top metrics that are sure to turn some heads:

• 93% of the marketers feel that interactive content is very effective at educating the buyer.
• A recent report by DemandGen concludes that around 91% B2B buyers also prefer to engage with interactive and visual content.
• Almost 50% of the marketers surveyed in a recent Content Marketing Institute survey said that they are already using interactive content as an integral part of their marketing strategies
• According to a recent research report issued by the Content Marketing Institute earlier this year, 46% of marketers surveyed are using interactive content as a part of their marketing initiatives
• According to a recent research report by the Content Marketing Institute, more than 50% marketers trust assessments when it comes to engaging prospects in the early stage.
• Create and Present Interactive Content as Part of a Funnel Strategy A well-planned interactive funnel can support agency lead generation while also helping clients move prospects from awareness to conversion.

Leads essentially pass through 3 stages before converting – Early Stage (Top of the Funnel), Middle Stage (Middle of the Funnel), and Late Stage (Bottom of the Funnel). And at each stage you need to engage prospects with a different strategy and messaging in order to encourage them to go to the next stage.

If you tie the benefits of interactive experiences to each stage of the funnel, your clients are more likely to visualize the end results. You can also position these experiences as an extension of your existing digital agency services, giving clients a clear reason to invest in a broader engagement strategy.

Give Them Examples

Nothing can make a case better than examples. If your clients are able to visualize the use of interactive content for their industry or, even better, their business, they would be convinced enough to give it a shot.

Reaching out to your customers forms the base for convincing them to switch to interactive content marketing. So, make sure you do it the right way. With the right strategy, interactive content for agencies can become both a valuable client service and a reliable source of recurring revenue. Becoming an interactive content agency gives your team another way to differentiate its services and deliver measurable value to clients.

To help you, we’ve created templates for various communications you can use throughout the process. You can find it in our Guide on How Agencies can create a new revenue stream with interactive content? Get access to ready-to-use sales email templates, case studies, decks & more. For agencies looking to build a stronger pipeline, these resources can also support agency lead generation by helping prospects understand the value of interactive experiences before they enter a sales conversation.

Download your copy now!